Blogging as it used to be

When she brought the tray and put it on the bed table I thanked her and ate a little of the supper. Afterward it was dark outside and I could see the beams of the search-lights moving in the sky. I watched for a while and then went to sleep. I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream. I woke for good long before it was light and heard roosters crowing and stayed on awake until it began to light. I was tired and once it was really light I went back to sleep again.

Can you guess the author?  Here is hint : these lines were written in 1929.  Yes, you got it right.  It’s Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms“, last paragraph of Chapter 13.

While reading the book, I caught myself a few times thinking that it feels a lot like a blog – first person story telling, simple sentences, a few “what I ate for breakfast” paragraphs.  But then again, somehow it feels better than a blog – connectivity, metaphors, a tiny hint of old times.

They say that one can improve his own writing by reading great writers.  Having this book in mind, I do agree with that.  And, it seems, I’m not the only one thinking of what and how to learn from Hemingway for my blogging – Copyblogger published Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well some time ago.

Clippings – the copy-paste extension for Firefox

Today I stumbled upon Clippings Firefox extension.  It makes it very easy to save and organize bits and pieces of text.  It offers really simple and intuitive interface, supports folders and drag-n-drop.  It’s the closest Firefox alternative to notes implementation in Opera, and I really enjoy it already, even though I used for just a few hours.

There are only things that I can think of that could make this extension better: search and support for hyperlinks.  Other than that, it’s just perfect.

Growing technological expectations

While reading through this post which discusses several office applications and their approach to group collaboration and offline editing, I once again got amazed as to how fast our expectations of technology grow.  Just think about the complexity of the problem scope – synchronizing a document which has been edited by serveral people, some of who has probably worked online.  And we, end-users, just expect this stuff to work.  More so, we expect it to work in all available alternatives.  And even more so, we expect this functionality to be given to us for free…

I guess I’m just trying not to remind myself of how things used to be five, ten, or fifteen years ago…

The origin of toasts

Yesterday I heard the story of toasting origins.  It sounded interesting, but somewhat unrealistic.  It turned out to be true:

The practice of toasting originated in Ancient Greece, at a time when fear of poisoning was a significant concern. To put guests at ease, the host would pour the guests’ wine from a common decanter, take the first drink to demonstrate its safety, then raise his cup to the guests and invite them to drink in good health.

Having fun with the Sidebar

I had a mood and a few moments to spend on making my blog better. This time I decided to take a closer look at the sidebar. I’m not finished yet, but the changes that you can see are the following:

  • Compressed archives. Archives have been taking too much of valuable space, so now they are compressed. You can either navigate (page by page) through archives for a particular year (which, I guess is not very useful), or click on a plug sign near the year that you are interested in. You’ll see the year expand into a list of months that have posts. Click on any month, and you’ll see the posts. If you want similar functionality for your blog, I used the Collapsible Archive Widget plugin.
  • On this day. I’ve been blogging for a few years now and managed to accumulate quite a few posts here. But neither me, nor most of the visitors to this blog ever went through the archives of this blog. It’s a shame, since there is plenty of cool stuff in there. I’ve installed On this day plugin, which shows up as a widget in the sidebar and shows a list of everything that got posted on this day in previous years. Also, if you are not on a front page, but reading a post, sidebar will show you more posts not from today, but from the day that post was published. It’s fun, like any other attempt of a time machine.

Update: Collapsible Archive Widget plugin has been replaced by Fancy Archives plugin, which is a bit more flexible and suits the need better.